Installing and Managing Apps

Introduction

After installing ownCloud, you may provide added functionality by installing applications.

Installing and Managing Apps

Installing Apps Via the ownCloud Marketplace

To add an app, use the Market app, which is accessible from the top-level navigation bar, on the left-hand side of the page.
Once in the Market app, click an app’s name to view more details about it.
Once you have done this, you can also install it by clicking Install.
Clicking Install, downloads it from the ownCloud Marketplace, installs, and enables it.

Sometimes the installation of a third-party app fails silently, possibly because appcodechecker' ⇒ true, is enabled in config.php.
When appcodechecker is enabled, it checks if third-party apps are using the private API, rather than the public API.
If they are, they are not installed.

If you would like to create or add (your own) ownCloud app, please refer to the developer manual.

Installing Apps Manually

To install an app manually, instead of by using the Market app, extract the app tarball into your ownCloud installation’s default app folder (</path/to/owncloud>/apps) or, ideally, into a custom app directory.

View App Status

To see the status of your installation’s applications, go to your Apps page, via SettingsAdminApps.
There, you will see which apps are currently: enabled, not enabled, and recommended.
You’ll also see additional filters, such as Multimedia, Productivity, and Tool for finding more apps quickly.

Enabling and Disabling Apps

On the Apps page (SettingsAdminApps), you can enable or disable applications.
Be default, enabled apps are displayed.
To disable an app, click Disable under its details.

To display disabled apps, click Show disabled apps.
To enable an app, click Enable under its details.

Configuring Apps

Some apps have configurable options on the Apps page, such as Enable only for specific groups.
However, this is the exception.
Apps are mainly configured from your ownCloud Personal or Admin settings page, or in config.php.

Using Custom App Directories

There are several reasons for using custom app directories instead of ownCloud’s default.
These are:

It separates ownCloud’s core apps from user or admin downloaded apps.
Doing so distinguishes which apps are core and which aren’t, simplifying upgrades.

It eases manual upgrades.
Having non-core apps in a directory separate to the core app directory makes them simpler to manage.

If you want to store apps in a custom directory, instead of ownCloud’s default (/app), you need to modify the apps_paths element in config/config.php.
There, you need to add a new associative array that contains three elements.
These are:

path

The absolute file system path to the custom app folder.

url

The request path to that folder relative to the ownCloud webroot, prefixed with /.

writable

Whether users can install apps in that folder.

After adding the configuration, ownCloud only installs apps in directories where writable is set to true.
The configuration example below shows how to add a second directory, called apps-external.